$nowballing

Tied with finding a job for biggest dread of post-bacc life is (drum roll) paying off student loans. I have well over the national average racked up in loans that were used to finance my BA (in philosophy.......) and now I have to pay up. Big time. When thinking about the end of my 6 month grace period I feel an unpleasant tightening in my chest and fear a heart-attack. I have lost a lot of sleep thinking about it.

However, a couple of tools and a solid plan have made me feel a lot better, like I have a bit more control over the next 20-30 years of my fiscal life. 1st off, this budget calculator from You Can Deal With It demonstrates how much life actually costs. Keeping in mind the starting salary for someone with my level of education in my fields of interest, etc., I realized that I will have a decent amount of wiggle room even with my student loan debt.

2nd, I am fully planning on using "snowballing" to pay off my debt. I have heard Suzy Orman talk about this (that crazy money-wise minx) and it is laid out here, along with other general personal finance tips. The basic idea is that you make the minimum payment on all of your debts EXCEPT the one with the lowest balance. You should pay as much as you can reasonably handle over the cost of the minimum payment every month towards the lowest balance. When that one is paid off, you pay the same amount of money that you had been using for the now-paid-off debt IN ADDITION to the minimum payment for the next lowest. (So if you were paying $250 for the minimum and about $100 extra per month, you would pay $350 in addition to the minumum balance for the next account in the snowball.) I am a non-genius when it comes to math but it makes good sense to go about it this way to minimize interest build-up and night terrors about being chased by angry Ben Franklins.